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Life · Quaffing · Tasting · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 11: Central Italy

Posted on by Josh

Sangio-crazy.

So on some last Tuesday of some sort, we were supposed to have practice (I love referring to practice blind tasting sessions as such because it sounds like I’m vaguely into sports) but it was cancelled because there’s a bit of a cold going around. The viruses have decided disregard me over the past few months so I’m lucky, and that’s saying something when you’re in retail because you’re basically touching everyone. I’ll get it at the worst time, I’m sure. That one birthday when I invited my friends over but was wrapped up in a blanket the whole time.

I hopped onto the 2015 Vancouver Wine Festival tickets slightly more ravenously than I did for Lady Gaga concert tickets last year, even though I’m not supremely stoked that Australia is the theme country.… read more

Quaffing

Dad blinds me on some wine

Posted on by Josh

What does it mean when you’re at a coffee shop, sitting at the window, glancing at the outside world as a lively background to illustrated maps of Italy on your computer, when people walk by and do a double take as they see you? Either I’m particularly handsome today or I’m off my game either today or always. Or I’m radiantly ugly or whatever.

But yes. It’s been a productive day of studying northern and central Italy, mapping out the budding and ripening nuances of the numerous grapes, matching up soil types to regions, and learning about the wines. Dreadful. I love Italy, but it’s basically like untangling a really big bowl of spaghetti. It’s fun, sans the history-laden parts, which – yes – I know are super important, but I’m just tossing those parts aside until later when I really want to fall asleep or something.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 10: Piemonte and Veneto

Posted on by Josh

Back to reality. It seems like everyone around me is getting post-holiday ailments but I’m doing my best to survive. The holidays were fun but thankfully, they’re never really over-the-top for me (besides last year’s Soave incident). I swatted all New Year’s Eve plans out of my view in favour for cooking myself a meal, drinking a bottle of wine, and sleeping at around midnight: and you’d think that would end up totally bumming me out, but I had a satisfying sleep as the planet fully rotated into 2015, and I woke up at a decent hour to do some wine reading.

I’m riveting. I know. No hangover: that was a thing, though!

I’m not the biggest fan of New Year’s resolutions, mostly because I don’t plan that far ahead, and because I think it’s weird to make weird and shallow decisions at some quasi-arbitrary time of the year.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 9: Workshop #2

Posted on by Josh

Okay, let’s be real here: it’s the holidays, and during the entirety of the WSET diploma, there was inevitably going to be at least one class that combined horribly with a hangover, and that day was today. I’m stubborn and quasi-meticulous: I’ve never missed a class nor have I ever not written about a wine we tried, but I just don’t have the willpower to give birth to separate posts this time around. Not that anyone’s really counting on me, anyways. Insert booing crowd here.

The last workshop we had consisted of one flight of three wines and some written practice. Today consisted of two flights of wine and no written practice (thank the gods), and we promised our instructor that we would practice on our own as if we were promising our parents to not have a house party while they were gone for a week.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 7: Australia

Posted on by Josh

My study schedule has happily been screwed up by – yes – a bunch of nights out, but conversely, a lot of time has gone into a wine lecture I had to prepare for. Practicing an hour-long speech doesn’t take a short time, especially if you’re trying to be witty the entire way through, but hey – it was fun and awesome and I like doing this kind of stuff.

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Australia was the topic of this week’s class – the huge booklet of information was intimidating, especially because I did next to no preparation for the class, but it was a good session. There’s a weirdly large amount of information for a region that we only focus one class on, and it’s weird when you see how a large chunk of Europe’s grape-growing area can be the same size of Australia.… read more

Life

Guest lecturer for a university class?!

Posted on by Josh

Science One is a difficult first-year program at UBC, which contains around 75 avid students. Its claim to fame are integrated classes that take place in one room, where professors switch out every hour instead of students, and there are term-end projects among other extra things that you have to do, that you otherwise wouldn’t do if you were in the normal science program. I mean, yes – this included tougher schoolwork, but there was also a field trip at the beginning of the year where I met some pretty cool people. And spending time with the same students helps lower the obstacle of meeting new people, especially when we all bonded by suffering through studying.

At the beginning of the lecture I gave a huge thanks to my Science One biology professor Celeste for inviting me – and to the other professors who surely thought this was a bad idea.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 6: Rhône

Posted on by Josh

I’m so behind. Too many things!

I recently attended a Blind Tasting Seminar led by the Guild of Sommeliers. Geoff Kruth MS and Jennifer Huether MS led the whole shindig, and we tasted six wines: a Sancerre, a white Crozes-Hermitage, a Rias Baixas, a Chianti Classico, a Saint-Estèphe, and a weird hipstery Morgon from Beaujolais. More on that in another post! It was legitimately exciting! So many exclamation marks!

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!!!

A friend texted me soon after to join for a sparkling wine event at Marquis and so I did, and all was well in my soul.

In the same week I attended a big dinner that had way too much wine and beer, but the gods did not think it appropriate to cast a hangover on me, and instead I felt rather okay the next day.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 5: Alsace

Posted on by Josh

Right now, I’m forcing myself to post at least one picture and story about something I’ve done since last class that really isn’t about diploma class, so here’s a picture of spirits I got to taste on Granville Island (before quickly moving to the nearest café to study the rest of Bordeaux). Finding time to enjoy blue skies during a day on Granville Island is literally almost impossible in Vancouver, so I took full advantage of it. My only regret is not snapping more pictures of colourful falling leaves, like a tourist, or a teenager who’s taken up photography enough as a hobby to start a Facebook page for his pictures and then stop updating it a month in. I’m sure that was me at one point, and perhaps worse?… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 4: Workshop

Posted on by Josh

Only five of the fifteen-ish of us showed up for class today, maybe because the topic of the class was “Workshop”, which sort of sounds unexciting, vague, and the opposite of compelling. Perhaps it was the endless rain last night, and I don’t blame the people who decided to dodge the fat and thunderous drops of Vancouver rain, instead opting to wrap themselves up in a thick blanket while eating pizza and watching Netflix. Hey – I’m jealous of you. But you know shit starts to get serious when you start practicing exam skills no more than four weeks into the unit, just at the brink of November, and the exam is in June.

We went over the exam structure, had an hour-long practice session for the written portion of the exam, and then we had a half-hour-long session for the tasting portion of the exam.… read more

Life · WSET Diploma

WSET Diploma – Unit 3 – Week 3: Bordeaux

Posted on by Josh

First off, the premiere of this hot mess:

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Fantastic coincidence that we studied Bordeaux in class this week. The screencap is from some reality TV show called the Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver, or something equally as unnatural-sounding, and it’s going to be a terrible trainwreck that everyone’s already predictably complaining about. Watching people’s reactions to something as obtuse as this show is almost as fun as watching the actual show itself. That, and there’s two degrees of separation with the girl who asks for a straw to put in her “Latour” from “Pomerol”, and that just makes it much more amazing.

Also, this.

(That label isn’t fooling anyone – that’s clearly Villa Teresa Rosé Frizzante.)

Back to Bordeaux: the renowned region is pure business.… read more